Why censure Team Anna for telling the truth?

The Congress on Tuesday moved a breach of privilege notice against Team Anna in parliament. It has threatened to sue Arvind Kejriwal for defamation. The Lok Sabha meanwhile adopted a censure motion against Anna Hazare and his team. The cause: Arvind Kejriwal’s remark at the Jantar Mantar rally on Sunday when he said 162 MPs in the Lok Sabha face criminal charges.

What are the facts?

Fact 1: 162 out of 543 MPs in the Lok Sabha do have criminal cases pending against them. No one – not even a single Lok Sabha MP – has ever disputed this fact.

Fact 2: 75 of these 162 MPs have serious criminal charges against them – murder, rape, extortion, kidnapping. No one – again not a single Lok Sabha or Rajya Sabha MP – has disputed this fact.

Fact 3: Some of these charges may be politically motivated. But the serious cases pending against 75 Lok Sabha MPs are not politically motivated. They are all based on court-framed chargesheets. This implies application of judicial mind. A magistrate has found enough prima facie evidence against these MPs to frame charges and allow the case to go to trial.

Fact 5: Over 1,175 MLAs, cutting across party lines in state assemblies around the country, also have criminal charges against them. In the recent Uttar Pradesh assembly election, the four major parties (the Congress, BJP, BSP and SP) gave tickets to known criminals to contest from dozens of constituencies. In several UP assembly constituencies, the voter was confronted with a choice between four criminal candidates – one each from the Congress, BJP, BSP and SP. A voter in these constituencies was left with no choice but to vote for a candidate with a criminal record (details here).

All the data cited above is in the public domain. The Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) and National Election Watch (NEW), which works under ADR’s aegis, have been compiling this data for years. Team Anna’s Arvind Kejriwal has simply restated ADR’s painstakingly researched facts which ADR has over the years consistently and openly used to campaign for a cleaner parliament.

It was ADR, founded in 1999 by a group of outstanding IIT/IIM alumni, whose PIL in the Supreme Court led to the apex court in 2003 ordering all political parties to disclose the financial assets and educational qualifications of Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabha candidates and reveal any criminal cases pending against them.

Parliament should laud the work of organisations like ADR and Team Anna who want to clean up parliament. Instead what do we have? A censure motion against Arvind Kejriwal and other Team Anna members for simply restating ADR’s data, which is available to all just a click away here, rather than urging party leaders to clean up parliament, the fulcrum of our democracy.

We may not all agree with Team Anna’s Jan Lokpal Bill. There are alternative models of governance we should consider which span electoral, judicial, police and administrative reforms (about which I wrote on the edit page of The Times of India on February 18, 2012, here). But between Anna’s anti-corruption crusade and the government’s corruption-tainted record, there is little doubt on whose side every right thinking Indian should be.

Our MPs are over-sensitive to criticism. They shouldn’t be. They are servants of the people and yet are a pampered lot. Most live in bungalows in Lutyens’ Delhi. The average price of a bungalow in Lodhi Estate or on Tughlaq Road (where incidentally Rahul Gandhi lives) is between Rs. 250 crore and Rs. 500 crore. The 890 MPs collectively in the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha therefore clearly cost you and me – who elect them, pay them and bear the cost of their accommodation through our taxes – a large amount.

How large? Consider only the value of the real estate they occupy and discount for the moment the free cars, travel, constituency allowance and other “perks” of office. These 890 Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha MPs cost us, at a lowish average of Rs. 150 crore per bungalow, well over Rs. 1.3 lakh crore in terms of real estate “foregone”. That’s nearly equal to the annual personal income tax paid by 3.5 crore individual taxpayers in India or, putting it another way, just a bit lower than our entire annual defence budget for 2012-13.

Instead of censuring Team Anna for telling the truth, MPs should censure their own political party leaders for giving criminals tickets to contest elections.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

Author

Minhaz Merchant is an author, editor, columnist and publisher. A recipient of the Lady Jeejeebhoy prize for physics, his books include biographies of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and the late industrialist Aditya Birla. After three years with The Times of India and a year with India Today, he founded, at 25, Sterling Newspapers Pvt. Ltd., a pioneering publisher of six specialised journals, including Gentleman, a political and literary monthly (whose senior editors and columnists included David Davidar, Shashi Tharoor, L.K. Advani and Dom Moraes), and Business Computer, in technical collaboration with Dutch media group VNU (renamed The Nielsen Company in 2007). Minhaz is chairman and group editor-in-chief of Merchant Media Ltd. and founding-editor of Innovate, a magazine for US-based CEOs. He heads the group’s think-tank, Global Intelligence Review. Having played tournament-level cricket and tennis – and rhythm guitar for his school rock band – he likes Dire Straits, R.E.M. and Sachin Tendulkar’s straight drives in roughly reverse order.
Follow @minhazmerchant on twitter

Minhaz Merchant is an author, editor, columnist and publisher. A recipient of the Lady Jeejeebhoy prize for physics, his books include biographies of former. . .

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Minhaz Merchant is an author, editor, columnist and publisher. A recipient of the Lady Jeejeebhoy prize for physics, his books include biographies of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and the late industrialist Aditya Birla. After three years with The Times of India and a year with India Today, he founded, at 25, Sterling Newspapers Pvt. Ltd., a pioneering publisher of six specialised journals, including Gentleman, a political and literary monthly (whose senior editors and columnists included David Davidar, Shashi Tharoor, L.K. Advani and Dom Moraes), and Business Computer, in technical collaboration with Dutch media group VNU (renamed The Nielsen Company in 2007). Minhaz is chairman and group editor-in-chief of Merchant Media Ltd. and founding-editor of Innovate, a magazine for US-based CEOs. He heads the group’s think-tank, Global Intelligence Review. Having played tournament-level cricket and tennis – and rhythm guitar for his school rock band – he likes Dire Straits, R.E.M. and Sachin Tendulkar’s straight drives in roughly reverse order.
Follow @minhazmerchant on twitter

Minhaz Merchant is an author, editor, columnist and publisher. A recipient of the Lady Jeejeebhoy prize for physics, his books include biographies of former. . .